Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

Meline Toumani has a great essay about the ways hatred between the Armenians and the Turks renders impossible the necessary objectivity of art. Toumani, an Armenian, can recount her version, but even telling her story she realizes that she tells one side and hates that: "I am doomed to be what is known as an unreliable narrator. I hate the way it feels." Her essay brings the power and force of hating to view in multiple perspectives. She acknowledges the fact of hatred, that "there are two things I know to be true. One: I know that if your grandmother told you she watched as her mother was raped and beheaded, you would feel something was yours to defend. What is that thing? Is it your grandmother you are defending? Is it the facts of what happened to her that you are defending, a page in an encyclopedia? Something as intangible as honor? Is it yourself that you are defending? If the story of the brutality that your grandmother encountered were denied or diminished in any way, you would feel certain basic facts of your selfhood extinguished. Your grandmother, who loved you and soothed you, your grandmother whose existence roots you in the world, fixes you somewhere in geography and history. Your grandmother feeds your imagination in a way that your mother and father do not. Imagination is farsighted; it needs distance to discern and define things. If somebody says no, what your grandmother suffered was not really quite as heinous as you're saying it is, they have said that your existence is not really so important. They have said nothing less than that you don't exist. This is a charge no human being can tolerate." But also, that hating corrupts her writing, her art. "Artistic objectivity: the ability to see a problem or an experience from multiple points of view; to tell a story for the sake of a deeper understanding, not to further an agenda; to inhabit the mind of the villain as fully as that of the victim. The villain, for me, had always been the Turk. It was time to try to understand him."

Diane Ravitch in the NY Review of Books looks at the myth of the exceptional Chinese schools and how it is fueling a testing craze in the United States. "At this juncture comes the book that Barack Obama, Arne Duncan, members of Congress, and the nation's governors and legislators need to read: Yong Zhao's Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon? Why China Has the Best (and Worst) Education System in the World. Zhao, born and educated in China, now holds a presidential chair and a professorship at the University of Oregon. He tells us that China has the best education system because it can produce the highest test scores. But, he says, it has the worst education system in the world because those test scores are purchased by sacrificing creativity, divergent thinking, originality, and individualism. The imposition of standardized tests by central authorities, he argues, is a victory for authoritarianism. His book is a timely warning that we should not seek to emulate Shanghai, whose scores reflect a Confucian tradition of rote learning that is thousands of years old. Indeed, the highest-scoring nations on the PISA examinations of fifteen-year-olds are all Asian nations or cities: Shanghai, Hong Kong, Chinese Taipei, Singapore, Korea, Macao (China), and Japan."

Frank Bruni writes about "Lessons of Hope: How to Fix Our Schools," Joel Klein's forthcoming book on education. Bruni hones in on Klein's conclusion that the key to improving education is better teachers. Klein wants to make it easier to remove poor teachers. But he also argues that we need to rethink how we educate our teachers. "He said the curriculum at education schools should be revisited as well. There's a growing chorus for this; it's addressed in the recent best seller 'Building a Better Teacher,' by Elizabeth Green. But while Green hones in on the teaching of teaching, Klein stressed to me that teachers must acquire mastery of the actual subject matter they're dealing with. Too frequently they don't." Here Klein sounds like Hannah Arendt, who argues that teachers must teach young people about the world as it is; the first qualification for teaching, she writes, is "knowing the world and being able to instruct others about it." Which is why the Bard College Masters of Arts in Teaching "requires an equal amount of advanced study in the elected academic discipline and in education courses challenging preservice teachers to apply the results of research and pedagogical analysis to their teaching."

Should international law apply to the Global War On Terror? Marty Lederman and Naz Modirzadeh are debating this question on their respective blogs. Lederman has argued that the Obama administration should be praised for trying to bring the War on Terror within international law. Modirzadeh worries that in doing so, the administration is making International Humanitarian Law into a "toolkit for targeting" civilians and combatants. In other words, International Law is being turned into a guidebook for how and when to target civilians in the war on terror. Modirzadeh writes: "The lawyers, professors, and others, such as Lederman, who have been instrumental in shaping the Obama administration's legal framework have a vested interest in defending the administration's interpretations of international law and policy. I understand that. But I would urge us to consider the long-term implications for the legitimacy and coherence of how international law regulates war of both the legal arguments and the way they have been presented. The arguments for a seemingly boundary-less conception of non-international armed conflict against a terrorist organization or network (one that is quickly splintering and disaggregating), while crafted in response to pressing national security threats, have tremendous implications for international law in the future. In the hands of Syria, Russia, China, and other nations, such legal arguments-especially when seen as legitimized by the world's superpower-may unleash a wave of other boundary-less NIACs. Surely it isn't only the Obama administration lawyers who would like to argue that international law allows for the determination that traveling terrorist fighters can be targeted outside of situations of 'hot' battlefields. These arguments also matter, not only for the immediate debate in the U.S. but also for the decades of state action to come. Poking holes in the divide between the jus ad bellum and the jus in bello, blurring law and policy, drawing from IHL targeting rules for situations that do not rise to the level of armed conflict: we should, at a minimum, pause to reflect on the implications of these legal and strategic arguments in the hands of decision-makers other than those in the current administration."

In an essay in The National Post, Bettina Stangneth, author of the recent book Eichmann Before Jerusalem, writes of the many and conflicting versions of Adolf Eichmann. Stangneth's book deepens our understanding of Eichmann and helps show the complexity of any attempt to understand him according to simple reductions. She writes: "Depending on whose account you read, Eichmann comes across variously as an ordinary man who was turned into a thoughtless murderer by a totalitarian regime; a radical anti-Semite whose aim was the extinction of the Jewish people, or a mentally ill man whose innate sadism was legitimated by the regime. We have a multitude of irreconcilable images of Eichmann, made even more so by the controversy around Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. The public view, however, largely remains an empty shell. We are still missing a view of the 'Eichmann phenomenon' before Jerusalem: the way Eichmann was perceived during the different periods of his life."

Sarah Burnside despairs over the fact that we can buy ourselves new hobbies, and therefore new identities, seeing it as a symptom of a larger cultural fracture: "'Identity politics' is commonly criticized for focusing on the narrowly personal at the expense of the structural, but such criticisms must be viewed with a skeptical eye. It would be ludicrous to argue that a person's race, gender, or sexuality has no impact on his or her lived experiences; you might as well claim that social class doesn't exist. Identities that are based on likes and dislikes, unmoored from the material world, are another matter entirely, however. It's jarring to read a journalist using the language of civic participation to refer to, say, enthusiastic adult fans of My Little Pony as 'the brony community.' The growth of bespoke selves may also be part of something broader: a kind of fracturing and splintering of the ways we conceptualize ourselves. If we're purchasing and inhabiting new identities, it's merely a continuation of our packaging and repackaging of curated versions of ourselves, such as in that minor absurdity of modern life: the Twitter bio."

Kelly Osgood sought out the music of the Pulitzer Prize winning poet Anne Sexton and couldn't quite put it away: "Anne Sexton the performer stands in some contrast to Anne Sexton the poet. Though both Linda Sexton and Bob Clawson claim she had no sense of rhythm and often fell into a kind predetermined modulation better suited for readings than musical performances, her voice on the recordings is lilting and measured, rising and softening in accordance with the band. Listening to a performance of 'Protestant Easter,' a hilarious poem that digs at New England Calvinism from the point of view of a child ('After that they pounded nails into his hands / After that, well, after that / everyone wore hats'), I begin to envision her covered in sweat, down on her knees in front of a congregation, shouting 'Praise Jesus!' as the organ trills away behind her. It becomes clear to me that I cannot separate the less comfortable aspects of Sexton and her work from the parts that are more easily accessible and more widely lauded. It was her unusual daring--can you imagine Plath doing a doo-wop version of 'Ariel?'--that fueled Sexton's work. I couldn't take only the fine formal verse and discard the later, sloppier, more desperate writings. I couldn't discard her failed experiments with prose and cling to only what was deemed Pulitzer-worthy."

Michael Powell spent the days before and the hours after Madison Bumgarner's heroic World Series performance with the pitcher's father back home in Hudson, North Carolina. His essay makes vivid the small town and homespun world from which Bumgarner hails and to which he still returns every year. Powell also introduces us to Kevin Bumgarner, Madison's father, who reminds us all that pride, while a sin in general, is a thing of beauty when expressed by a father to his son: "Then Kevin pulled out his phone. He had texted Madison after the eighth inning, and he tried to read it to me. He began to choke up and just handed me the phone. 'OMG. You're so much more than awesome,' Kevin had written to his son. 'To see you work on the mound reminds me of watching you in high school. You are willing yourself to perfection and dragging the team along with you. I couldn't be more proud of your baseball accomplishments.' Kevin looked at me. 'I knew he wouldn't read that text before the game was over,' he said, 'but I wanted him to know this was what his daddy thought of him.'"

This week on the Blog, Jeffrey Jurgens discusses Arendt's analysis of the Western tradition of revolution and how revolutionary episodes for her failed to enshrine the people's freedom in lasting institutions in the Quote of the Week. Marcel Proust provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. In our Video Archives, we look back on a 2011 roundtable discussion on Occupy Wall Street. And we appreciate a particular passage that Arendt felt worthy of being underlined and marked with other annotations in our Library feature.

This coming Friday, November 7th, the Hannah Arendt Center will host the first session of its new Virtual Reading Group. We will be discussing the Prologue and the Introduction to The Human Condition.

The reading group is available to all members and is always welcoming new participants! Please click here to learn more!

The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard is a unique institution, offering a marriage of non-partisan politics and the humanities. It serves as an intellectual incubator for engaged thinking and public discussion of the nation's most pressing political and ethical challenges.

Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

If you want an example of why distrust of American institutions is at epidemic proportions, listen to the investigative report of the New York Federal Reserve based on secret tapes made by one of their Senior Bank Examiners, Carmen Segarra. Segarra, a lawyer with impeccable credentials, was hired by the Federal Reserve after the financial crisis as part of an effort to bring in new personnel who were more willing to stand up to the banks they were charged with regulating. Segarra's story is told jointly in a hour-long radio show by Ira Glass on "This American Life" and in an investigative article by ProPublica's Jake Bernstein. Here is one exchange between Bernstein, Segarra, and David Beim, author of a once secret report commissioned by the Federal Reserve to study why the Fed had failed to adequately regulate banks in the lead up to the 2008 financial crisis.

David Beim: So I could just read the fear of speaking up list of quotations. And it goes like this: "Don't want to be too far outside from where management is thinking. The organization does not encourage thinking outside the box. After you get shot down a couple of times, you tend not to go there anymore. Until I know what my boss thinks, I don't want to tell you."

Jake Bernstein: According to Beim's report, this culture of fear paralyzed the Fed in the years leading up to the financial crisis and prevented it from taking action. It's not that the Fed regulators didn't notice the problems accumulating in the financial system that eventually brought it down.

David Beim: They were aware of those problems coming. There were lengthy presentations on subjects like that within the organization. It's just that none of those meetings ever ended with anyone saying, "and therefore let's take the following steps right now."

Jake Bernstein: Carmen was used to the private sector, where she says meetings ended with specific action items. People knew what they were supposed to do.

Carmen Segarra: None of that happens at the Fed. It's like the information is discussed, and then it just ends up in like a vacuum floating on air, not acted upon. And the mere act of having this meeting, for them, is almost like akin to having done something about it.

You can read more about Segarra and also about George Packer in this week's Weekend Read.

Jeremy Waldron in the NY Review of Books raises important questions about the "libertarian paternalism" of nudging as social policy. Nudging is the idea that government encourages healthy or rational behavior not by commanding it but by changing default choices. Instead of banning large sugary drinks, for example, the government could require that restaurants serve diet soda in medium cups unless the customer expressly asks for a large sugary drink. Customers remain free to fill themselves with sugar, but, nudged by the default choice, more customers will consume less. Waldron admits such nudging helps many live healthier. But he worries: "I am afraid there is very little awareness in these books about the problem of trust. Every day we are bombarded with offers whose choice architecture is manipulated, not necessarily in our favor. The latest deal from the phone company is designed to bamboozle us, and we may well want such blandishments regulated. But it is not clear whether the regulators themselves are trustworthy. Governments don't just make mistakes; they sometimes set out deliberately to mislead us. The mendacity of elected officials is legendary, and claims on our trust and credulity have often been squandered. It is against this background that we have to consider how nudging might be abused. There are deeper questions, too, than these issues of trust and competence. As befits someone who was 'regulation czar' in the Obama White House, Sunstein's point of view is a rather lofty one and at times it has an uncomfortable affinity with what Bernard Williams once called 'Government House utilitarianism.' Government House utilitarianism was a moral philosophy that envisaged an elite who knew the moral truth and could put out simple rules for the natives (or ordinary people) to use, even though in the commissioner's bungalow it was known that the use of these rules would not always be justified. We (the governors) know that lying, for example, is sometimes justified, but we don't want to let on to the natives, who may not have the wit to figure out when this is so; we don't trust them to make the calculations that we make about when the ordinary rules should not be followed. Williams saw the element of insult in this sort of approach to morality, and I think it is discernable in Sunstein's nudging as well."

In an interview, Hillary Mantel compares Thomas Cromwell, the subject of her books Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies, and Margaret Thatcher, the subject of the only new story in a collection that's about to be released: "Creativity in politics is rare but I think she had it... Cromwell did too. But there are big differences. He was a negotiator and she detested consensus-she saw herself as an Old Testament prophet delivering the truth from on high. Cromwell used history to pretend the new things he was doing were old and thus to soothe the English temperament. Mrs. Thatcher despised history as a constraint."

In a survey of the state of the essay about research into the relationship between madness and creativity, Tom Bartlett suggests that maybe we want our artists to suffer a little bit: "The depressed writer is a stock character, like the ditzy cheerleader or the slick salesman. It's something we believe almost without thinking about it, in part because that pathetic figure so frequently appears in books and movies, and because we can point to historical examples of artists plagued by mental illness. John Berryman leapt from a bridge. Virginia Woolf walked into a river. David Foster Wallace, a fairly new addition to this sad list, hung himself. We mull the meaning of their deaths, divine clues from the works they left behind. We do the same with other artists. After Robin Williams's recent suicide came the predictable musings about whether his comedic brilliance was fueled by his apparent depression. Was his manic humor a tool to keep the darkness at bay? Our readiness to accept the connection between mental illness and creativity makes Andreasen's research all the more palatable: It is approval from on high of what we already feel in our guts. Perhaps it's perversely comforting to us nongeniuses that artists, in a sense, pay dearly for their cultural accomplishments. Maybe you'll never produce a great American anything but at least you're not nuts. At the same time, it's nice to think that the mentally ill harbor some special skill, and to argue otherwise seems unkind."

Hannah Arendt's call to think without banisters has captured the imagination of political thinkers. Within a symposium on Tracy Strong's important book Politics Without Vision: Thinking without a Banister in the Twentieth Century, Patchen Markell offers a definition of thinking without a banister: "I'll begin with a terminological question: What are 'visions' and 'banisters,' exactly? Often, Strong's uses of these terms, and especially the latter, seem to refer to what we used to call 'epistemological foundations.' He begins his book by saying that the phrase 'thinking without a banister,' for Arendt, 'meant for her that humans no longer could rely on any transcendental grounding to finalize their thinking' (1, emphasis added). What this amounts to is the idea that action cannot be underwritten by 'complete' knowledge of the world, not because there are things we should know but cannot, but because 'human understanding [is] not exhausted in the act of knowing.' Absent the banister of knowledge, we are compelled to relate to the world aesthetically, which means we acknowledge the 'presence of the incomprehensible' and, consequently, we recognize that 'what one says about it is necessarily in and only in one's own voice,' a recognition that 'necessarily opens and relates one to others making a judgment of their own' (13). What sets Strong's authors off from the tradition that precedes them, it seems, is that all take up the challenge of thinking without banisters in this sense, radicalizing Kant's critique of knowledge under the weight of their anticipation or experience of the horrors of the twentieth century." The Symposium has essays by Markell, Linda Zerelli, Mary Dietz, and a response by Tracy Strong. The entire symposium can be found in the journal Political Theory.

In a profile of Bard College president Leon Botstein, Alice Gregory reveals the sound and fury that he finds necessary to running a small liberal arts college with relatively few resources (the Arendt Center is housed at Bard). In Botstein's case, it often means taking risks and fostering innovation with the faith that the funding will follow. Gregory suggests that the key to Bard's recent success is a series of attempts at revising the traditions of secondary education, specifically mentioning the college's revolutionary programs in prisons, it's acclaimed high school early college programs, and its innovative ways of admitting new students. People ask how Botstein does so much with so little. Gregory writes that Botstein turns the question around: "Botstein, who has accused other college presidents of doing nothing more than 'running something that is somewhere between a faltering corporation and a hotel,' seems genuinely baffled by what he sees as the financial conservatism of most well-endowed liberal-arts schools. 'I'm a little mystified about what they do with their money,' he said." For Gregory, Botstein has created Bard in his "polymath image": "Classes are small and seminar style. Freshmen arrive on campus three weeks before the fall semester starts, not to river-raft or play getting-to-know-you games but to study philosophy, literature, and religious texts for five hours a day. In January, they are required to stay on campus and work in science labs. Unlike many colleges today, Bard still has distribution requirements. Before declaring a major, sophomores must present and defend papers before a board of professors. All seniors must write theses.The school remains small-there are fewer than two thousand students-and resources are scarce. But Botstein has built Bard, which saw a thirty-per-cent increase in applications this year, into an academic center that punches far above its weight."

This week on the Blog, Anne O'Byrne discusses Arendt's reaction to a Matisse exhibition and what "stripping away the face" means for our humanness in the Quote of the Week. Athenian historian Thucydides provides this week's Thoughts on Thinking. We look back on a 2010 Lunchtime Talk with Bill Dixon on a new critique of globalization in our Video Archives. In our Library feature, we discover a Bible in Hannah Arendt's library and wonder whether she herself owned it. And Roger Berkowitz discusses Carmen Segarra and the "unwinding" of America in the Weekend Read.

The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard is a unique institution, offering a marriage of non-partisan politics and the humanities. It serves as an intellectual incubator for engaged thinking and public discussion of the nation's most pressing political and ethical challenges.

Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.

Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.

Simon Critchley at "The Stone" reminisces about Dr. Jacob Bronowski's "Ascent of Man" series and specifically the episode on Knowledge and Creativity. At one point in his essay Critchley inserts a video clip of the end of the episode, a clip that suddenly shifts the scene "to Auschwitz, where many members of Bronowski's family were murdered." We see Dr. Bronowski walking in Auschwitz. He says: "There are two parts to the human dilemma. One is the belief that the end justifies the means. That push button philosophy, that deliberate deafness to suffering has become the monster in the war machine. The other is the betrayal of the human spirit. The assertion of dogma closes the mind and turns a nation, a civilization into a regiment of ghosts. Obedient ghosts. Or Tortured ghosts. It's said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. That's false, tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some 4 million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge with no test in reality, this is how men behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of Gods. Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known. We always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible. In the end the words were said by Oliver Cromwell, 'I beseech you in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.'" It is a must read essay and must see clip. And you can read more about in Roger Berkowitz's Weekend Read.

In the wake of President Obama's yearly promise to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, South African writer Gillian Slovo suggests that, just as important as closing the base is acknowledging what happened inside: "There are two qualifications for being in Guantanamo: you have to be male, and you have to be Muslim. And once you've had the bad luck to be shipped there, you're stuck. Ordinary prisons in democratic societies work because of the cooperation of prisoners, most of whom, if they behave well, know they will eventually be freed. Not so in Guantanamo: there are the voiceless who, the American government has decided, do not deserve a trial. That's why, as Lord Steyn said, the American government made every effort to stop us from knowing what was happening there and that is why it is the responsibility of those who do have a voice in our world to let it be heard."

In the midst of the debate concerning whether the allegations against Woody Allen should affect how his work is received and celebrated, Damon Linker discusses the philosophical nihilism underlying Allen's work and its moral implications. He points to the 1989 film Crimes and Misdemeanors, in which a married man who murders his lover in order to prevent her from disclosing their affair not only gets away with the crime but manages to entirely overcome his guilt and find happiness. In a 2010 interview with Commonweal magazine that Linker quotes, Allen explained the existential meaninglessness that he wanted the film to depict: "[E]veryone goes to his grave in a meaningless way.... [O]ne can commit a crime, do unspeakable things, and get away with it, and some of them are plagued with all sorts of guilt for the rest of their lives and others aren't. There is no justice..." Nihilism threatens to bring about a world in which anything becomes possible and permissible because we no longer see human life as having meaning. And yet, nihilism, as Hannah Arendt saw, can also be central to the practice of thinking and acting that creates meaning. For more on Woody's nihilism, see Roger Berkowitz's Weekend Read.

In an interview, comics artist expresses her ambivalence about love: "Well, love isn't an end in itself, no emotion is. Emotions are signposts directing you to actions, and the actions have varied consequences beyond the scope of the events that instigated them. I'm more interested in examining the state of being in love, of accommodating that feeling and attempting to legibly express it, than I am with mapping the initial process of a romantic attraction. If the lovers in my stories seem to struggle to connect with one another, it's because that's what being in love mainly entails, this ongoing mutual desperate groping for communion. I don't mean to argue that I think love isn't worthwhile! I think it absolutely is, but whether I think that or not, love and every other strong emotion will still be rampaging through the animal kingdom, kneecapping all attempts at independent decision-making, compelling us to conform our behavior to its purpose, which is mainly procreative. In fact the inevitability of it is reassuring. Pulling these things apart a little is beneficial, and I'd like to see it done more, but questioning a concept doesn't equate to rejecting it outright. I question it precisely because I believe in it so strongly."

Linda Besner, striking an Arendtian note, wonders what it means that we have abandoned the idea of cowardice. One worry is that if we no longer speak of cowardice we may no longer be able to praise bravery. Besner suggests that contemporary definitions of bravery-facing down your own fears-are useful for self development, but not so much for living with others: "without a moral category of cowardice, are we really entitled to a category of bravery? The argument that Fear is Courage sounds unsettlingly Orwellian, and paves the way for the simple admission of fear to replace overcoming it. The emotional risks of facing one's feelings matter; but an inward-looking process focused on self-actualization is different from a sense of duty to the wider world. If cowardice consists in failing the collective, bravery may be said to inhere in taking personal risks for the greater good."

In the same special issues on "Generation" that elicited Carol Becker's reflections discussed last week, Jan Verwoert asks "why would Capital exploit the miraculous, if it was not for the fact that it is a source of infinite generative energy?" He writes, "Miracles happen always and everywhere. Art presents us with evidence of their occurrence daily, in the most mundane fashion: every little instant in which the mind clears, an intuition takes shape, you see what you couldn't see before, and what couldn't be resolved suddenly can be; in the spot where the writing got stuck the night before, words fall into place; the morning after, you meet someone by chance who opens a door and a project that seemed unrealizable yesterday goes through no problem; the fingers find their way across the key--or fretboard and a song is born; the painting that has been staring back at you for weeks or months now, half complete yet incompletable because it's evident that it lacks something but is impossible to see what-well, that canvas suddenly opens up, and within the shortest amount of time things shift into perspective and the work is done. This is a miracle. It cannot be achieved, or caused by any known means (drugs don't work). It occurs."

This week on the blog, Bill Dixon reflects on the "sandstorm of totalitarianism" that is based upon "loneliness as the normal register of social life, the frenzied lawfulness of ideological certitude, mass poverty and mass homelessness, the routine use of terror as a political instrument, and the ever growing speeds and scales of media, economics, and warfare." And in the Weekend Read, Roger Berkowitz explore truth, creativity, nihilism, and the affaire Allen.

The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard is a unique institution, offering a marriage of non-partisan politics and the humanities. It serves as an intellectual incubator for engaged thinking and public discussion of the nation's most pressing political and ethical challenges.

Law school applications have gone off a cliff. Just look at this statistic from today’s NY Times.

As of this month, there were 30,000 applicants to law schools for the fall, a 20 percent decrease from the same time last year and a 38 percent decline from 2010, according to the Law School Admission Council. Of some 200 law schools nationwide, only 4 have seen increases in applications this year. In 2004 there were 100,000 applicants to law schools; this year there are likely to be 54,000.

This radical drop in law school applications is not because people are suddenly reading Shakespeare. The reason is clear. Lawyers aren’t getting jobs. For law school grads in 2011, only 55% got full-time jobs working as lawyers. That means 45% did not get jobs they were trained to do. No wonder students and their parents aren’t lining up to take out debt to get a legal education.

Just as journalism has been upended by the Internet revolution, so too law is changing. The changes are different. Lawyers are still needed and law firms will exist. But more of the work can be done more cheaply, off-location, and by fewer people. Quite simply, we need fewer lawyers. And those we do need, don’t command the salaries they once did.

Finally, law school was for years the refuge of the uncommitted. For liberal arts grad unsure of what to do next, the answer was law school. But now with tuitions skyrocketing, debt ballooning, and job prospects dimming, law schools are out of favor.

What is more, these changes coming to law schools will be coming to other professional and graduate schools as well. All those Ph.D.s in hyper-specialized disciplines ranging from Italian studies to Political Theory are in for a really tragically rude awakening? There are no jobs. And those jobs are not coming back. For academics to keep bringing young scholars into Ph.D. programs now is really deeply wrong.

This retreat from law school is a good thing. My J.D. was hardly an educational experience worth three years of my time. Law schools are caught between being professional schools training practicing lawyers and the desire to be also to be something more. The result, they largely do neither well. They don’t produce lawyers ready to practice. Nor do they produce deep legal minds. Little would be lost if law school were reduced to 2 years (or even less), which is why legal academics are pushing an experiment to offer two-year J.D.s.

Education does matter and will continue to distinguish people who pursue it and excel at it. Liberal arts majors who combine a love for the renaissance with an interest in dance will succeed, whether they create new works of art or found a business curating Italian wines, these students learn to pursue their dreams. Education will survive because it raises people from their daily lives to the life of the mind. Education, as opposed to factory schools and large lectures, fosters creativity and daring, leading people to invent lives for themselves in pursuit of their passions.

While education will survive, schools and universities that have become credentialing factories will be increasingly challenged. When what matters is measureable performance, credentials will become ever less important. Law schools—at least many of them that do not offer an elite status—are credentialing institutions. So too are many of the colleges and universities around the country, where students sit in large lectures for four years so that they can get a degree that stamps them employable. Such credentials are ever less valuable in an age of cheap Internet driven education. That is why these institutions are under pressure.

The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard is a unique institution, offering a marriage of non-partisan politics and the humanities. It serves as an intellectual incubator for engaged thinking and public discussion of the nation's most pressing political and ethical challenges.